1. The Galactic Context of Ancient Myths
One of the most
famous and respected scholarly attempts within the mainstream of
academia to construe ancient myths from a wide variety of cultures
— Celtic, Scandinavian, German, Graeco-Roman, Sumerian, Egyptian,
Persian, Native American, and Hindu-Vedic — in a paleophysical
sense is the monumental and critically important work by
philosophers Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechind,
Hamlet’s Mill: A Essay on Myth and the Frame
of Time. While it would be impossible to summarize their
work adequately here, one salient conclusion about their study
should be noted. This is that many of the images and motifs from a
supposedly “primitive” time were subsequently wildly misinterpreted
because the galactic astronomical context to which those motifs
referred was ignored, if it was not totally unknown. While any
attempt to summarize their work here would inevitably fail, some
concepts should be highlighted, since they dovetail I have said
elsewhere188 concerning ancient
concepts of space and the harmonic interconnectedness of things in
it.
Indeed, De Santillana
and Von Dechind noted that one very curious feature of this
“archaic cosmology” was not only its emphasis on a primeval “cosmic
harmony,” but also its description of the creation of the
present world as a kind of “breaking
asunder” of that harmony, “a kind of cosmogonic ‘original sin’
whereby the circle of the ecliptic (with the zodiac) was tilted up
at an angle with respect to the equator, and the cycles of change
came into being.”189 And they hint at
the tremendous anomaly at the heart of this cosmology with an
astute observation, an observation many other researchers have
pointed out, for such a view requires an astronomical knowledge and
“prodigious feats of concentration and computing.”190 This implies that
underlying the relatively “primitive” states of ancient cultures,
even ancient cultures as sophisticated as Babylon or China, was
something even more sophisticated. Here De Santillana and Von
Dechind halt, never speculating on what that might be. They are
simply concerned with a cataloguing of the cross-cultural motifs,
and with an elucidation of their possible meaning in physical and
astronomical terms.
One common
implication of their cross-cultural comparative mythology approach
is that the ancient cosmology was profoundly aware that “the fabric
of the cosmos is not only determined, but overdetermined
and in a may that does not permit the simple
location of any of its agents, whether simple magic or
astrology, forces, gods, numbers, planetary powers, Platonic Forms,
Aristotelian Essences or Stoic Substances. Physical reality here
cannot be analytical in the Cartesian sense; it cannot be reduced
to concreteness even if misplaced. Being is
change, motion and rhythm, the irresistible circle of time,
the incidence of the ‘right moment,’ as determined by the
skies.“191 In other words,
”there is no simple location, no analytical space.“192 While they observe
that these ideas ”were incompatible with anything that our physics
can think of,“193 this is not
entirely true. While the “on-locality” of any of the active agents
in the ancient cosmology was something of a puzzle to De Santillana
and Von Dechind, in fact, with the advent of Quantum Mechanics and
Bell’s Non-Locality Theorem, it is not a puzzle at all, but quite
the reverse.